PDC Day 04 (Goodbye, Vista Brick Road)

That's it for this years Professional Developers Conference. It's done like dinner. As I'm writing they just announced that there was a single winning ticket for the L.A. lottery here, which was at $250 million. Yup, that's a quarter billion dollars which is about what it probably cost for this years PDC. A slow day for walking (9,030 steps, 6.84 miles) and pretty quiet as things wound down. The Channel 9 guys were giving away the bean bag chairs so a few people were on the bus with their own Channel 9 guy they can use in their cubicle (can you imagine explaining that to airline security or even buying an extra ticket for your chair?). 

No SharePoint sessions today. Sad huh? I finally managed to hook up with Kate Gregory this morning during breakfast. When you come to these things there's sessions you want to attend (or have to give), booths to see, etc. but you end up always hooking up with people and getting distracted (the butterfly effect). This is what's been happening all week with me and others mention it as well. It's good that I met a few people (even stumbling across Medhat, a MCS guy from Calgary that I've known for years) on the last day as it might be awhile before I see them again, even though we're always travelling around and such. Kate of course was heading off to the C++ talks which I heard was pretty interesting.

I sat in on the future of Agile panel discussion. It was a good talk but didn't seem to talk much about the "future" of Agile but rather the current state of Agile and what Agile meant to everyone. On the panel were (pictured below, left to right) Don Reinertsen, Peter Provost, Jim Newkirk (father of NUnit), Don Reifer, and Clemens Szyperski, with Randy Miller moderating the fishbowl session.

What is Agile? The panel generally agreed that was "emphasis on feedforward rather than feedback" with emphasis on keeping the feedback loop short and most stated it as a "series of practices to add value to clients" which sums it up nicely. Jim Newkirk had a biased towards "the smallest amount of process needed to get the job done" with a high bandwidth within the team (which is key to any Agile practice). Peter Provost was happy to say that Agile was about the "right thing at the right time for his customers" and to do the right thing at the last "responsible" moment.

Don Reinertsen had a great analogy for Agile. He said it was like standing in the fog on a road. Waterfall is where you put a plan together to get to the end of the fog (where that is) whereas Agile tends to have you walk 50 yards, make adjustments, continue, etc. until you complete the journey. This "plan as I walk" approach is great and will give you that immediate feedback that you're on the right track (or allow you to correct it if you're heading down the wrong way).

Randy stepped up during a question and talked about the "total team" where everyone is communicating and collaborating, not just the devs. Get your testers, analysts, and architects all involved as it's important how they interact. The concept of "exploratory testing" came up (which is a term I hadn't heard of before, but then contrary to popular belief I don't know everything [except when it comes to SharePoint]) but the whole panel was quite happy about seeing this emerging and suggested taking a look at it to involve everyone.

All in all a good session (but I did have to duck out early) but check out the blogs linked above for more information. There are also a great set of links all over the place for Agile but you can start here (which is one of the many jumping points to other places).

So I'm here in L.A. for another day taking in the tourist stuff tommorow and snapping pics of the Los Angeles wildlife. A few things that I've learned from this trip:

  • Take the business class flight if it's over a couple of hours, your butt will appreciate the extra space
  • Don't check into a hotel with a shower designed for munchins.
  • Don't answer your cell at 11pm at night from a complete stranger who only knows you through your blog. More importantly, don't say "Yes" to going out on the town with them
  • The only quake I experienced in L.A. was in my head the morning after said phone call.
  • Don't take the Universal Studio tour at night. While the lines were short and beer was free, the only thing we got to see were chipmunks and it wasn't even Alvin and Theordore (and I think I just lost about half the readers of this blog with that comment, so that cuts down my audience to 4 instead of 8)
  • I genuinely feel that I have Electro's super powers as I was responsible for restoring power in our hotel after the blackout (well, at least it looks that way to me so just go with me on it)
  • Taking notes on my PDA sucks as it note only screws up when you switch away, but it's just a bloody mess trying to make heads or tails out of it hours later. Next time is a Tablet PC and OneNote.
  • Wireless was hit and miss. After the first day I couldn't get my laptop reconnected to wireless except back in Munchkin land so it was wired hookups. It's odd because I could almost always get WiFi'd with my PDA. Go figure.
  • Oh yeah, SharePoint v3 ROCKS!

Again I want to say hi to everyone that I came across (it was cool seeing a few dozen people reading my blog while I was wandering through the computer areas). Also shouts out to those that I came across at the last minute like Julie Lerman, Kate Gregory, Todd Bleeker (wish we had more time to talk), Ted Pattison, Eli Robillard, Patrick, Jan, of course Fitz and the Professor and Mary Anne (and everyone else I missed).

Next week I'm starting a series of V3 posts with focus on individual features so a bit of a more deeper dive into what's to come. Talking to Fitz before I left he'll be posting almost daily for the next few weeks with all the stuff that he can now say so keep an eye out there as well on other blogs in the SharePointSphere so you can see all the cool stuff coming to a virtual machine near you.

Tags and Links

Flickr
Moblog
Google Maps where I'm staying (Miyako)

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